Café Diego Maradona Gramellini – Corriere.it

The first time i met Maradona I was in the San locker room Paolo. Stood barefoot in one Bank, wrapped in a blue bathrobe, and shouted: journalists you are gods jerks. They, we journalists, in short, take notes in silence. Only one, particularly scrupulous, stopped the pen in midair to ask him: Excuse me, Diego: you said stupid? No, I just said idiots. And all relieved we dived again notebooks. I was watching the scene at mouth open: I was twenty-six, like him, but he was Diego Armando Maradona and I was a cronistello athlete at the beginning. Despite the excitement, I immediately realized that I was not alone in the presence of a champion and a fool. I was in the presence of a Leader. Since then I was the in During years. I’ve seen him do things inexpressible, For better or worse. I spent nights in Street, crouched behind a bush, spying on suspicious movements inside his ever-crowded house. I’ve been waiting for him for hours without work airports and from the training sessions that I almost never attended, but when I did they weren’t training, they were sample. I’ve seen him do the Goal Impossible (his words), placing the ball on the goal line, where it crosses the goalkeeper’s small area: to score from that position you have to violate half a dozen laws of the physical, giving the ball a dry effect of ninety degrees, also in a very short trip.

Naturally, it was successful because it was Maradona, but it was also Maradona because then he returned to the line of background, crouched at the feet of Zola or children of youth, they grabbed their own ankles and gently moved them towards him ball, in the vain and moving attempt to convey a talent supernatural, which, as such, could not be taught to others. I saw it bargain from noon to one with a Tangerine to encourage the School kids from a deprived neighborhood, and you try to haggle for so long without letting the mandarin and especially the leg fall to the ground. He had muscles of character mythological. Including that of heart. In a world where the talent awake envy, teammates what adore us almost more than fans. Eraldo Pecci told me that one day, as soon as he got to Naples, he was She complained in the changing rooms due to the malfunction of the TV of your residence. Returning to the room at night, Pecci had found the door wide open and, inside, two dribble peeking out from under the television in the middle of a tangle of cables: it was Maradona who changed it l’antenna. On another occasion he argued with the president Ferlaino because I hadn’t paid the match bonus a couple of children del Primavera called up for the first team. He went to Find them in their offices. The president is not here, the secretary told him. I do not have rush, I wait here. And he kept a book and a couple of magazines in the anteroom all afternoon. He came back the next day, and the next day, until Ferlaino opened the door, and wallets.

What it represented Naples and for Napoli only one can say Neapolitan, and generally when saying it they approach him tears to the eyes. It was certainly Maradona alone there, although it was hard for him to be Devil. Have you ever thought what it is? test be me ?, he said after the umpteenth mattana (He had risked putting a child under the car). I mean: be Maradona briefcase one day, while you go to the bar to have a beer just because maybe you are sad, or from the tobacconist to buy the cigarettes. He liked to do the victim. Imagining that the whole world was mad at him was his way of load. Played to do the misunderstood and the poor richbut it was never false or servile. Had managed to to argue even with dad Wojtyla during an audience, telling him that he would have to sell some Vatican gold roofs to help the needy. But you really told him Dieguito? I swear! it is I laughed like a brat who knows he has succeeded. So, because he was capable of jumping generosity surprising and of carinerie absolutely free. I saw it fendere against the traffic a suffocating crowd, at the risk of their safety, to again shake the hand of a unknown chronicler that at the end of an interview he had forgotten to say hello. I can say for sure because that unknown reporter was me. And because he was like that: before I gave you the moron and then he gave you the hand. (Memories of readers here)

The common view that myths, viewed closely, reveal the weaknesses of his human nature. Maradona, on the contrary, has always been more valued of those who knew him and of those who took his character from rumors. I don’t mean to deny its shadows gigantic: multiple parenting, road, unpaid taxes, even Shooting from the window of the house to a handful of spectators. Maradona did not miss anything. But his story is not just a mix of talent me transgression. To make it a legend it took a character. Unfortunately, his was bipolar: pushed it in up and dragged him to abyss, like those artists who create works in one raptus and destroy them in another. Fortunately, he could not ruin them neither did he. In a very distant Napoli-Fiorentina I saw it bargain A young man Baggio and against dribbling from him: I don’t think football will have anything more best to offer myself. Hated it when sob the Neapolitans against the Italian team, on the eve of the semifinal world, becoming the unlikely leader of a secession. But when, during the final, they lost to the Germany, the whole stadium in Rome is whistling, I am not ashamed to say that from my corner of the press gallery I made a typhus desperate and unjustified for him. I will never be remembered as a role model and I will always be a tragic hero, at least for me. Of those who can not change and leave us suddenly with a wasted and unfinished feeling. Then to put a video of your goals to find a sense. If I had to write your epigraphI would borrow the words of Eric Cantona: A hundred years from now, when we talk about football if you talk about Maradona, as now to speak music we talk about Mozart.